Ever since getting my hands on some Opta data, courtesy of Manchester City’s Analytics challenge all the way back in August 2012, I’ve been wanting to try something different with the data. Although it’s taken me over a year to get around to doing it, I’d initially thought of the idea of doing some kind of Network Graph to explore how the players were interconnected throughout a match, and potentially over an entire season. Since starting to play with Gephi some time ago, I figured it would be perfect for the job.

In a move to stimulate the analytics community, Manchester City Football Club have teamed up with English Premier League statistics provider OPTAPro to release a full data set of Premier League players for the 2011-2012 season. The MCFC Analytics project has been created to harness some of the amazing talent out there in the analytics community and provide fresh ways of analysing OPTA’s performance data.